Saturday, July 16, 2005

What do you use to represent information inside of the system?

From "information representation" point of view there are two types of information: 1) Main information - information about anything in the real world.2) Auxiliary information - information which helps to connect main information with the real world. Examples of auxiliary information: words, phrases, email contacts, URLs, ...

Auxiliary information representation

In order to connect main information to the real world AI needs some additional information. Like human brain's cortex cannot read, hear, speak, or write --- the same way main memory cannot directly be connected to the real world.So, AI needs some peripheral devices. And this devices needs to store some internal information for itself. I name all this information for peripheral devices: "auxiliary information".Auxiliary information is stored in the tables designed by AI developer. These tables are designed on the case-by-case basis. Architecture of a peripheral module is taken into consideration.For example, words are kept in WordDictionary table, phrases are kept in PhraseDictionary table.As I said: auxiliary information connects main information with the real world.Example of such connection:Abstract concept of "animal" can relate to concepts "cat", "tiger", and "rabbit". Concept "tiger" can be stored in the word dictionary. In addition to that Auxiliary information may or may not be duplicated as main information.Text parser may read word "tiger", find it in the word dictionary: Then AI may meditate on the "tiger" concept and give back some thoughts to the real world.